IRC technology news from the first half of 2026
40 points by donio
40 points by donio
That's a lot of developments in the IRC scene! There might be less users than at peak but there is collective interest in improving the protocols and user experience, which is great!
To those who feel inspired to dust of their old IRC-setup (and to those who have not yet found their way to the channel); #lobsters at libera is very much both active and alive!
It's interesting to see all those IRC mobile clients! The concept actually never crossed my mind before, because IRC has such a strong desktop feel to me: it has to be constantly online and running, or else you'll miss messages. Maybe this is also influenced by how I used to use IRC: signing on in the evenings, when my friends were likely to be on. It was intentional.
Contrast with Discord or Slack, which are a very different kind of constantly on: despite being on my person 16 hours a day, they're much more asynchronous. It's okay to temporarily have poor signal, or to close the app, or to get back to someone half a day later.
I think the nested format of multiple channels per space helps encourage an async workflow. When I was on IRC, my friends mostly congregated in one channel, and the conversation flew by too quickly for future participants to join in later. Whereas those same friends are now on Discord, and the conversation is spread out among 8-10 channels. (Also, we have boring adult lives and responsibilities now, which slows down the conversation a bit.)
it has to be constantly online and running, or else you'll miss messages
My IRC client keeps randomly disconnecting and not detecting it which is a bug I was thinking I should fix but.... I've actually kinda come to see it as a feature. Missing messages isn't that bad of a thing, like is it really necessary that we see everything vs just coming back later and maybe being like "hey what's up?" or just even letting it go?
There's this "fear of missing out" but I've come to think I'm not really missing out, I'm just doing other things and that's OK.
Many of the newer clients that use IRCv3 features are particularly well suited for running with a bouncer, and on mobile in particular it's almost certainly what you'd want to do. IRC with a bouncer is a lot closer to Discord or Slack usage-wise, where you're always "online" but mostly idle, and can check for new messages whenever you like (or even get push notifications in some cases).
Lots of cute ircv3 extensions, indeed... But where's the e2e extension that IRC deserves? Based on omemo, ideally.
Further deferring encryption is just irresponsible.
It is difficult to implement E2E when every IRCv3 feature is opt-in by clients. If even a single client in a chat room doesn't support a hypothetical end-to-end encryption, the message would have to be sent over the wire normally, defeating the purpose of encryption.
It's a different story for private messages, which has wrinkles, but it's more doable. Since chatrooms are the most common use of IRC I think it makes sense it's not a priority.